Monday, December 22, 2008

Green Arrow/Black Canary #15

It's hard to judge a new writer based on a flashback issue. Andrew Kreisberg takes over GA/BC this issue, and I'm can't really guess if I'll like his take or not. The two leads are characters that I've loved on the JLU cartoon, but in comics they've never really done it for me. So I WANT to like this comic, but after reading this first issue, it seems like Black Canary might be kind of incompetent. She lets a bozo new villain called "Dregz" get the drop on her, and GA has to help her get away. Then she uses her canary cry to take him out at the end of the issue, and as near as I can tell, her sonic scream blasts through a wall and injures some violin-lover in his apartment (Fiddler?). I'm not sure what the point of that is, unless we're supposed to think that Black Canary is careless, not really a message I'm too keen on. That accounts for about 6 or 7 pages of the comic, the rest is a recap of GA: Year One and the GA/BC comic so far. Then we get a couple pages as Speedy and Green Arrow II are written out of the book. I actually think writing them out is for the best, keep the focus on the leads and try to build them up.

Mike Norton's art is fine. I'd read he is trying to draw more in his "own style" and not copy Cliff Chiang as much, but I'm really not seeing too much a difference. He's fine, but not spectacular. There are some odd choices in this comic, as the selling point for a new creative team, I can't find much to bring me back next month. This book remains very skippable.